Santorum stretches Senate record

It was a dazzling moment for Rick Santorum: as a freshman senator, he stood on the Senate floor and watched as a senior liberal Democrat finally admitted he was wrong, Santorum was right, and it was time for the nation to ban late-term abortion.

At least that’s the story Santorum has told in a number of campaign speeches over the past year. In a testimony to his own tenacity, Santorum recalls for voters how Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy approached him, requested time to speak and then publicly bowed to the logic of Santorum’s arguments on a proposal to ban the procedure known as partial-birth abortion.

Story Continued Below

“Pat Leahy stood there, and in a pained fashion finally admitted that the arguments I was making, that we were making on the floor about this bill and about this horrific procedure, were just too overwhelming to resist,” Santorum said in one telling at the social conservative Values Voter Summit in October.

There’s just one problem: Santorum’s account differs sharply from how Leahy’s circle remembers the same events, and with what the Vermonter said on the Senate floor at the time.

And that disparity is only one measure of how Santorum has stretched or embellished his senatorial record on the campaign trail over the past year. He also takes individual credit for the 1996 passage of welfare reform legislation, as well as said he “pushed to create” Title XX for abstinence education — except that that statute existed long before Santorum was elected to the Senate.

Santorum’s spokesman said that the senator was indeed a key player in all of the above legislation and that any suggestion otherwise was a matter of nitpicking, or deliberate political antagonism.

Every senator — and every politician — who runs for president is prone to a bit of résumé-padding.

Newt Gingrich has drawn mockery for taking partial responsibility for ending the Cold War, while Mitt Romney has struggled to justify claiming credit for the creation of over 100,000 jobs. Finding the line between touting one’s accomplishments and blowing them out of proportion is not a 2012-only problem: recall Al Gore’s infamous claim about the creation of the Internet.

Santorum’s campaign-trail bragging has been less eye-popping than some others, but it’s been subtly misleading all the same — surprisingly so, for a candidate whose public image is built on an aw-shucks, truth-telling conservative image. Sometimes it’s merely a matter of dramatic storytelling. Other times, Santorum markedly overstates his individual role in shaping the law.

In the case of the Leahy story, Santorum has painted a vivid image for voters of how he wore down his Democratic foe, relating at the Iowa state fair last summer that Leahy ultimately “stood there and painfully recounted the arguments that I had been making over the past four years. And he finally said he could no longer stand against the weight of the argument.”

It’s true that Leahy switched his vote on late-term abortion, first opposing the Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 1995 that would’ve banned the procedure and later voting to override President Bill Clinton’s veto of the same bill.